US cloud computing company Oracle has announced a significant expansion of its Oracle Cloud Abu Dhabi Region, deploying the first Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Supercluster in the Middle East. The new infrastructure will be powered by over 4,000 advanced NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, designed to bolster sovereign AI initiatives across the region.
This deployment caters to the growing demand for high-performance AI compute clusters, providing governments and enterprises with a powerful, local alternative to infrastructure based in Europe or North America. By addressing data sovereignty concerns, the supercluster aims to accelerate AI adoption, particularly in regulated sectors.
Powering Sovereign AI Initiatives
The OCI Supercluster is strategically designed to support sovereign AI goals throughout the Middle East, delivering exceptional compute capabilities for complex AI training, inference, and research. This expansion directly aligns with Abu Dhabi’s ambition to become the world’s first fully AI-native government by 2027.
Oracle positions itself as the only hyperscaler capable of delivering its full suite of AI and cloud services across public clouds, customer data centres, or at the edge. This flexibility provides governments and regulated industries with critical control over data residency, latency, and overall AI sovereignty.
Advanced Compute for Key Industries
The expanded infrastructure in Abu Dhabi will help customers in key regional industries accelerate their AI adoption. These sectors include smart government, energy, financial services, healthcare, logistics, aviation, and telecommunications.
The NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs at the core of the supercluster offer a substantial performance leap, delivering up to 30 times faster real-time large language model inference and requiring 25 times less energy than the previous generation. This efficiency enables more powerful and cost-effective AI workloads, from frontier model training to agentic AI and scientific computing. The OCI Supercluster technology can scale to over 130,000 GPUs for zettascale performance.
Oracle’s Expanding MENA Footprint
This launch is part of Oracle’s broader strategy to deepen its investment in the region’s digital infrastructure. The company already operates multiple public cloud regions across the Middle East, including locations in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Jeddah, with further plans for a third Saudi region in Riyadh and cloud infrastructure in NEOM.
Earlier this year, Oracle announced it was increasing its investment in the Abu Dhabi cloud region fivefold to meet growing demand. The company has also committed to a major, multi-year investment into Saudi Arabia’s digital cloud and AI infrastructure. Furthermore, Oracle is a key partner in the landmark Stargate UAE project, collaborating with entities such as G42, OpenAI, and Nvidia on a next-generation AI infrastructure cluster.
About Oracle
Oracle is a global technology company that provides organizations around the world with computing infrastructure and software. The company offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services, most notably through its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It is known for its database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software products.
Source: middleeastainews
